Washington (CNN) -- A series of blog posts on Monday purportedly by Edward Snowden said he leaked classified details about U.S. surveillance programs because President Barack Obama worsened "abusive" practices instead of curtailing them as he promised as a candidate.

In 90 minutes of live online chatting, the person identified as Snowden by Britain's Guardian newspaper and website insisted that U.S. authorities have access to phone calls, e-mails and other communications far beyond constitutional bounds.

While he said legal restrictions can be easily skirted by analysts at the National Security Agency, FBI and CIA, Snowden stopped short of accusing authorities of violating specific laws. Instead, he said toothless regulations and policies were to blame for what he called "suspicionless surveillance," and he warned that policies can be changed to allow further abuses.

"This disclosure provides Obama an opportunity to appeal for a return to sanity, constitutional policy, and the rule of law rather than men," he posted. "He still has plenty of time to go down in history as the president who looked into the abyss and stepped back, rather than leaping forward into it."

Abuse of authority can occur without laws being broken (or provably broken). It happens all the time.

It is also possible to be compliant with the letter of the law while violating its intent.

The bottom line is that this President has shown that he can't be trusted not to abuse his authority against our own citizenry. That's why people are reacting to this now, in the wake of the recent Benghazi cover-up, the targeting of the Tea Party by the IRS, the targeting of Journalists by the Justice Department. Most people now do not trust this man._________________History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. -- Abba Eban

Blackmail is and has always been a consequential component of our political system. This ought not to be controversial. Blackmail — like its sister B-word, “bribery” — has largely gone mainstream and been institutionalized. “Opposition research” is a profession that is openly practiced and is considered respectable. Opposition researchers, like lobbyists, will tell perfectly accurate stories about the useful role served by their profession. The public deserves to know the truth about the people in whom it will invest the public trust. Legislators require information and expertise that only industry participants can provide. True, true! But these are, obviously, incomplete accounts of the roles that these professionals play. Lobbyists don’t simply inject neutral, objective information into the legislative process. And opposition research is used in ways other than to immediately inform the public. For both bribery and blackmail, there is a spectrum of vulgarity. A guy gives you a suitcase of hundred-dollar bills that you hide in your freezer in exchange for a legislative favor. That’s vulgar, and illegal. But the same gentleman hints in conversation that, should you ever choose to “leave public service”, his firm would be excited to hire someone with your connections and expertise (expertise which, it needn’t be said, ought naturally be reflected in legislative choices!) and that is tasteful, normal, legal. Those jobs are worth a lot more than a suitcase full of C-notes. Similarly, it is vulgar and unnecessarily risky to show up in a Congressional office with a dossier of compromising pictures, or the dossier documenting ones participation in a fraud. You just have to make it known that you know.

I’m going to excerpt a bit from a great, underdiscussed piece by Beverly Gage:

Quote:

[J. Edgar] Hoover exercised powerful forms of control over potential critics. If the FBI learned a particularly juicy tidbit about a congressman, for instance, agents might show up at his office to let him know that his secrets—scandalous as they might be—were safe with the bureau. This had the predictable effect: Throughout the postwar years, Washington swirled with rumors that the FBI had a detailed file on every federal politician. There was some truth to the accusation. The FBI compiled background information on members of Congress, with an eye to both past scandals and to political ideology. But the files were probably not as extensive or all-encompassing as people believed them to be. The point was that it didn’t matter: The belief alone was enough to keep most politicians in line, and to keep them voting yes on FBI appropriations.

We jokingly referred to him as Emperor Alexander — with good cause, because whatever Keith wants, Keith gets… We would sit back literally in awe of what he was able to get from Congress, from the White House, and at the expense of everybody else.

Bribery and blackmail go together, of course. The carrot and the stick. It’s not just that bad things will happen if you don’t toe the line. If you do the right thing, who knows? You might be the next Dianne Feinstein. Or John Boehner. Or Barack Obama. Note that, despite my excesses in this regard as a writer, I did not place do-the-right-thing in italics or scare quotes. There is a third element in this recipe for influence: persuasion. People don’t like to view themselves as venal, corrupt, weak. Even the sort of person who ends up “senior in politics” has limits to how crass a view of themselves they will tolerate. Bribery and blackmail are omnipresent in the background, but in the foreground are spirited conversations, arguments over policy, arguments in which I suspect decisionmakers frequently start with the hardest possible line against the position to which they will eventually be persuaded so that they can reassure themselves. They have been persuaded, it was not just the pressure. I accuse Barack Obama of having been effectively bribed and blackmailed on these issues, but if he ever were to respond, I suspect he would deny that fervently and with perfect, absolute sincerity. He was persuaded. He knows more now than he did then.

We humans are such malleable things. This is not, ultimately, a story about evil individuals. The last thing I want to do with my time is get into an argument over the character of our President. I could care less. The problem we face here is social, institutional. Bribery, blackmail, influence peddling, flattery — these have always been and always will be part of any political landscape. Our challenge is to minimize the degree to which they corrupt the political process. “Make better humans” is not a strategy that is likely succeed. “Find better leaders” is just slightly less naive. Institutional problems require institutional solutions. We did manage to reduce the malign influence of the J. Edgar Hoover security state, by placing institutional checks on what law enforcement and intelligence agencies could do, and by placing those agencies under more public and intrusive supervision. I think that much of our task today is devising a sufficient surveillance architecture for our surveillance architecture.

Make up your mind. The greatest American alive has already got his Nobel Peace Prize._________________1958. It's been traveling twenty-two years to get here. And now it's here. And it's either heads or tails. And you have to say. Call it.

Snowdon is the greatest American alive. He deserves a Nobel Peace Prize and the Medal of Freedom.

++
Let's not forget Manning.

I don't consider them in the same class. Manning was just a fishnet stocking wearing misanthrope who acted out; the information he disclosed was pretty much useless, and he didn't stop anybody from wrongdoing. Snowden has blown the whistle on Big Brother. The only question is whether people are smart enough to do something about it._________________History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. -- Abba Eban

Snowdon is the greatest American alive. He deserves a Nobel Peace Prize and the Medal of Freedom.

++
Let's not forget Manning.

I don't consider them in the same class. Manning was just a fishnet stocking wearing misanthrope who acted out; the information he disclosed was pretty much useless, and he didn't stop anybody from wrongdoing. Snowden has blown the whistle on Big Brother. The only question is whether people are smart enough to do something about it.

they are not in the same class, no, yet the fishnet dude did more than 99.999999 % americans did, and now he's paying for your sloth._________________“If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him”

He didn't do anything for anybody. Everything he dumped was either already known or uninteresting (except maybe to the ISI)._________________History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. -- Abba Eban

He didn't do anything for anybody. Everything he dumped was either already known or uninteresting (except maybe to the ISI).

If it was known, why did people vote the way they did, or join the military with do-goody patriotic delusions? Or do you imagine everybody who joined just wanted to blast civilians from an apache helicopter for no reason whatsoever and scream "fuck yeah" in process? I really doubt that the percentage of well-informed, totally calculating sociopaths is that high, even in military. Hell I bet most sociopaths get weeded out in basic training.

Which one is it?

Don't get your hate of socket-wearing transgenders, and perhaps your own insecurities taint your view of what happened. People had wrong image before then, they sat at their homes imagining that soldiers were doign the tough work of fighting scary, vicious enemy, much in the way glorious war is portrayed in the media and literature.

What he did was removed that conceptual gap that exists between those who were there and those sitting on their fat arses, gobbling cheeseburgers (or latte). He removed the editing and censorship process, and provided footage (even tho its gory, but guess what, it is gory) that should be journalists job to begin with. In that sense he even more exposed the drift between massaged propaganda that mainstream media is spouting and the reality.

It's all a step in the right direction._________________“If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him”

Last edited by Prenj on Sat Jun 22, 2013 8:15 am; edited 1 time in total

That video was already out. Besides, I don't see anything wrong with somebody saying "fuck yeah!" when they take out what was thought to be bad guys carrying heavy weapons to kill friendlies. Don't go "embedded" with armed insurgents in an area the press has been warned to stay out of if you don't want to get shot.

Anybody who thinks they can go out there and kill or be killed in an unemotional fashion has never done so and has watched too many movies.

Even if you can't understand that people running around in the middle of a battlefield sometimes get shot, this is nothing but a mistake at worst, and not some kind of wrong-doing._________________History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. -- Abba Eban

Last edited by Bones McCracker on Sat Jun 22, 2013 8:17 am; edited 1 time in total

That video was already out. Besides, I don't see anything wrong with somebody saying "fuck yeah!" when they take out what was thought to be bad guys carrying heavy weapons to kill friendlies. Don't go "embedded" with armed insurgents in an area the press has been warned to stay out of if you don't want to get shot.

Even if you can't understand that people running around in the middle of a battlefield sometimes get shot, this is nothing but a mistake at worst, and not some kind of wrong-doing.

Oh really. How many times you've been in combat?_________________“If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him”

It's hard to reconcile our expectations of day to day life with how horrible it can be. Nevertheless, sometimes it's better to fight than to submit._________________History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. -- Abba Eban

It's hard to reconcile our expectations of day to day life with how horrible it can be. Nevertheless, sometimes it's better to fight than to submit.

The wisdom lies in picking the fights, but the only option is fight. I remember when I was maybe 6 and was playing with other kids, then the local bully showed up, stealing our toys. I said back something and stood up, he got me by the neck and pushed down, and there is this decision moment playing out in your head, where you know he's stronger but are you more afraid or more uncomfortable by being dominated. So punched him, and got bloodied nose, but damn that felt good. I kept doing it ever since, and got better at it. Fuck the bullies.

What I am talking about here in these forums, I guess, is that your Rome is a bully, and it became apparent when I realized my state post balkan wars, and how it played, felt, was. So I looked at world with different eyes, and saw bullies everywhere. You guys happened to be the worst one.

But your prime has gone. What was once good, its almost gone, it's only the paranoid bully left. The organism is sick and dying, and turning in on itself, like a cancer. There are very few pure things that come out of there nowadays, almost everything is tainted. If not by blood and opression, then its tainted by greed.
All of the GMOs, oil wars, propaganda bullshit, robbery of people's tax money to support parasitic organism within the system, the system itself, its dying.

Every day it has less and less, because it has corrupted what has given its life. The population in general is not the highest educated, most proficient anymore. Sure there are pockets of excellence here and there, but on the whole, its all old news. You still have catapults left, but the barbarians are coming. You know the alive ones, with big dicks and no need of gold. And I'm not talking about talibans and islam, cos thats just another lie, it's just a competition to your particular brand of bullshit, more of the same.
Whats coming is evolution. Solar power, green planet. The death of the ridiculous old fucks with their pinstripe suit and symbols of power. They will be as irrelevant and ludicrous as royal families are in Europe nowadays. They are so insignificant, that nobody even wants to protest against them anymore. Well the same will happen to the merchant class, it will also become a fossil of the old glory days, and they will be kept alive in their delusion so that new generations can see them, see how ugly they really are, how everything is bullshit, the flag, the presidency, the wall street, the champaigne and caviar, the rolex watch. The young ones will be able to see it and think "was that it? were people really impressed into slavery by that bullshit? wow thats like when europeans sailed around the world for the first time and impressed locals with beads and mirrors."
It won't work anymore.
So those who live today, they are either enabling the new thing, or clutching to the old, in the delusion that it makes them special and grandiose somehow. That it compensates for their fears and complexes. For King and Country! Raaagh._________________“If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him”